by Rix (54095) Alter Relationship on Tuesday October 23, @12:46AM (#21081367) I'm assuming you're referring to "googling".
Things just happen faster then they did 40 years ago.
People in academia generally make citations.
To hold others to a standard you yourself do not achieve. What's the word for that again? Ends in "crite," sounds like "hippocrates..." (cough) If I were much worried about opinions in this thread, I probably would go look up evidence. However, given the discussion at hand, I very much doubt they'd actually get read, and so I don't really feel like wasting my time. As soon as any of you shows a level of comprehension that indicates actual study, I'll be happy to go looking. But, for now, I just don't believe that standard has been achieved. I'm sure you'll rant and rail about that too, in the desperation to avoid what I actually said in favor of some random bit on which to hang your hat.
It's times like this I wish I could calc sarchasm on SlashDot. (No, it's not a misspelling, it's an inside joke. Yes, I know, if it meant what you thought it meant, there wouldn't be an 'H' there. Don't get distracted.)
True. However, they know a lot more about it than you do.
That's descriptive rather than proscriptive linguistics
Oh, please, don't throw your wikipedia muscles at me. I'm not David Hume and this isn't 1983. I'm not trying to invoke either descriptive or proscriptive linguistics. I'm just pointing out that you don't know what the hell you're talking about, and that you're using the internet to fill in data so that you can try to make it appear that that is not so. It turns out that both descriptive and proscriptive linguists think the recent behavior of the OED is shameful. They have allowed a lust for profit take down their crap filters. That's not descriptive linguistics, it's poor taste. Get off of geocities and read a book. That's not what descriptive linguistics is.
I used the Oxford Dictionary link merely because it was one of the first I googled.
Yeah, that's my point. Twenty years ago, you wouldn't be pretending to know this stuff, because you wouldn't be able to fall back on google to cobble together things that were close enough to accurate to fool someone with your deep education on the matter. I hope the dripping sarcasm doesn't leave a stain on the floor.
Long and short of it: if you can't argue it without Google, you also can't argue it with Google - whether you know that or not seems to be entirely a different matter.
(You see what I did there?! Someone call the linguistic police!)
Would that there were such a people, that you might be tossed in the hoosegow for a few weeks for hyperbole without comprehension. This world would be a lot better if, next to the drunk tank, there was a self important buffoon who doesn't know when to quit making an ass out of himself tank.
Also, "failing" to crack a game? Even Starforce was cracked. Give me a break.
I can see how you might assume that when other people are telling a story, that they might be making it up, since that seems to be your modus operandi (that "vast bulk" invention of yours being why I believe that.) However, I'm not like you. If you're going to talk about copy protection, first you should know something about how copy protection has worked in the real world. Spyro had several layers of copy protection, the middle several of which didn't immediately shut a game off; instead they introduced what appeared to be bugs into the game. On five seperate known occasions, major release groups released "cracked" versions of Spyro, each time to retract them afterwards. Each time, purchase rates spiked the following few days.
Give me a break.
If only you meant "a break from pretending to know things I don't on SlashDot." I write video games for a living. Chances are I know a little bit more about copy protection history than you do.
Media has been devalued to the point of no return.
No, it hasn't: many companies are getting extremely rich off of media. Your opinion, however, is a different matter.
Dictionaries sell according to word count. Therefore, to accept new definitions is an advertising tactic. The Oxford English Dictionary hasn't had standards for forty years; that's why they've accepted the misspelled company name of a company that has existed for less than ten years as a non-slang word. That is contrary to the rules Oxford themselves laid out less than fifty years ago, wherein a term in circulation for less than a hundred years could not be considered anything but slang, and could have no normative meaning.
Linguistics isn't an armchair game. If you've never taken classes or read textbooks (and it's pretty clear that you haven't if you think the OED is a lexicon with discretionary quality worth using as a reference) then you should stop pretending to know what you're talking about.
There was nothing worse than to call yourself that
Actually I remember otherwise. I knew very good programmers who were delighted when they were described as 'hackers' or even better 'mega hacker'.
Oh goodie, another borderline shibboleth. Let's try this again. There's nothing worse than to call yourself that. There's nothing wrong with someone else calling them that. Then again, "mega" wasn't a prefix used in slang until the early 80s, meaning that if they were being described as mega-hackers, it was by people who were at least a decade too late.
Chances are pretty good that you've never met anyone from the era that everyone's trying so hard to pretend they were a part of. Programmers back then numbered in the tens of thousands, worldwide.
There's nothing legal about buying stolen property
Yes, and if there's one group who has the right to be angry that someone else stole their property, it's TorrentSpy. I'm not standing up for the MPAA, but Jesus, doesn't it bother who you're siding with? I mean, if you've got two parties and the MPAA is the less corrupt of the two...
That bit about "when hypocrites attack?" I'm having a hard time figuring out whether you mean the MPAA, TorrentSpy, or yourself. I'd ask you to clarify, except that I don't actually want for you to do so.
Essentially, the MPAA said "we will give you anything if you rat these people out and obtain evidence for us", yet "didn't know" he was doing it illegally?
Wait, let me get this straight. This guy worked for a company whose entire reason to exist was to index illegal content, and you're surprised that he is of poor character? (I'll spare you the morals vs morale quip.)
You're forgetting that the overwhelming majority of people pirating those films would NOT pay to see them.
Yeah, yeah. People say that all the time because they think they can't be called on it. Nonetheless, those same people who say that about video games were lining up around the block after each and every failed attempt to crack Spyro. Believe it or not, most of the people who steal would in fact buy if they didn't have the option to steal. I'd refer you to ESA studies on the matter, but I'm sure you'd think they were biassed (god knows why - the more accurate their numbers, the better their proponents' ability to act) and reject it in favor of your imagination.
So, let's say about $100 USD per film and call it even.
Well, as long as we're making up numbers, why not call it $0? I bet that'd make you feel a whole lot better about your personal theft.
Just because you want to pretend stealing movies is okay, even if you have a flimsy justification, doesn't mean that it actually is. A better man would be ashamed to have said what you just said in public.
It's easy to say that, but the right to privacy applies to criminals too.
I don't believe he said anything to the contrary. All he was doing was rightfully pointing out how funny it is. Nobody's suggesting that it's right, just that it's hilarious. If you need another example of something that shouldn't happen but is nonetheless hilarious, insert Bush joke here.
The reason you want criminals to get away
Er, what? I think it's funny, and I don't want the criminals to get away. Maybe you shouldn't try reading between the lines so hard; you seem to be picking up signals from external sources. Not everyone on SlashDot sympathizes with content thieves.
Yeah, because anyone who spends $15,000 to stop a haemmorrhaging of millions of dollars a month is totally braindead, and if the problem can't be stopped, there's no sense in trying to make it less bad.
It's a shame there isn't a metamoderation for "blind zealot." Whoever modded you up wasn't thinking.
For those of us who are programmers, a hacker was a status symbol
No it wasn't. There was nothing worse than to call yourself that. Please stop posing. You weren't around back when it was in use, and your quick read of TNHD hasn't given you the depth of context that you seem to believe you have. You weren't around back then, and you should stop pretending that you were. It's dishonest.
the sysadmin that could throw together some code and make that new system their IT manager bought actually work right.
"Hacker" was out of use long before the job "IT Manager" even existed.
I'm not going to change my vocabulary
It's not your vocabulary. It's something you heard from someone else. Just because one college teacher told you a story doesn't mean you've got the bead. It's slang. Move on.
So do me a favor, get off your high horse, get out of the basement, and get a life.
You're way further up on your own ire than the person to whom you're responding.
I want to be defined as a hacker
And you never, ever will be. Let it go. You're not Mel.
Yes and no. Within the slashdot community, the word hacker has a different meaning.
Yeah. It's a giant red "poser" flag. The word that people are trying so desperately to prop up was out of use in its original context before it began use in the new one. The people who were actually around back when the word "hacker" meant something productive all find the issue quite amusing, in a decidedly sad way; while you guys sit here clinging to the definition of a piece of slang that went out of use in the 80s, we all just sit here watching you pretend to be something you never were.
The Jargon File isn't a social handbook. Let it go.
Several studies have indicated that despite the carbon emissions, the vapor trails of commercial jets actually create a net COOLING effect due to albedo.
And with a greener fuel, the net cooling effect will be bigger per plane. What's your point? In a cumulative system, a bigger minus is still a plus, if you'll forgive the choice of phrasing. It's not like the effects of the jet stop once it crosses the zero line.
The conclusion of one research paper from a reputable institution
Oh honestly.
In our zeal to protect the environment (which I share), let's concentrate on the REAL problems please!
Believe it or not, this one project does not actually exclude all other projects from progress. It's a small budget project to take a swing at a small benefit. SlashDot posted it because it's interesting. Have a valium.
noise which just distracts us from those real problems.
And do you have a suggestion about what those real problems are, or are you just histrionic and looking for attention?
Oh goodie, he's speaking for me. This always goes well.
Myriad is not a well-designed face
Yes.
Helvetica is useless
Didn't say that.
and boring
Yes.
over 10 pts
Didn't say that either.
and nobody does type design on OS X?
Well, I'd ask you who did, except you're not going to list anyone except Chank, and then when I ask why you can't name any, you'll say "because I don't know the names of font designers." And then when I tell you that that's because you don't know much about fontography, you'll either say "yes, I do, just not with the people who practice it and drive the field forward," which is a bit like someone saying they're an automotive engineer because they replace their own oil, or you'll again try to pretend that fontography isn't a word, which will make everyone near you who knows much about this stuff to giggle.
I would love to hear more about your study of..."fontography" (is that like typography but only for people who use Fontographer?)
No. Perhaps you should read a book.
To a designer, you sound a lot like a programmer.
Why, did you ask one? Given your obvious familiarity with terminology, I hope you don't claim to be a design professional.
Paragraph after paragraph of 100% correct technical reasons why a particular design/implementation *should* be better than another, but in the end not realizing that theory and reality don't align as much as theory would suggest.
Well, if that were really all I'd said, you'd have a point. You're pretty good at near-misses. Pity this isn't horseshoes or hand grenades.
I feel like I'm reading yet another rant from the 1990s about why Truetype fonts *must* be inherently better than Postscript, which focus entirely on technology while completely ignoring the market reality of what type designers and foundries were actually releasing in each format.
I wonder if you understood those people either. It turns out that discussions of a format's superiority don't indicate that the format is the best choice, and a good example of why is the non sequitor you just plunked down. Ever heard of BetaMax or LaserDisc? Both were better formats than the competition of the day, but both were poor choices considering the general availability.
By the way, TrueType was never superior to PS Type 1. Whatever you were reading may explain your current conceptual model of algorithmic font layout concerns, which are called "fontography," rather than all type layout concerns, which are called "typography." It's a bit like suggesting that algebra doesn't exist because your software package says it's for math: a mistake that only a rank amateur would make. Just because your day job is drawing stuff in GoLive doesn't mean you're a designer. When you've taken classes and are familiar with typographic history, or at least display some remote comprehension of what you're talking about, let someone know.
but whether or not it's appropriate to think of them as actual replacements for their Web Core versions depends entirely on their license
Maybe you should try looking. As I clearly said previously, they can be freely downloaded and used, just like the T and V series.
It's still nowhere near as nice as Slimbach's Adobe Myriad
You're nuts. Myriad is a simple low-serif geometric grotesk, and isn't honestly that nice anyway. You might as well be bragging about Obelysk or Slab Serif. There's a reason geometric fonts have dropped out of use, except on the web: they look awful, no matter what you do. Candara is a weighted, hinted derist font with line cueing, directional caps, kerned weighting, distance kerning, clustering and grouping. They're in a completely different ballpark. If you want an Adobe font of similar caliber, they exist; Jensen, for example, is of that quality plateau. No swiss derived font has anything even approaching this level of detail.
where rendered with Microsoft's peculiar anti-aliasing technique... particularly when printed out on paper or displayed using an accurate, non-pixel aligned rendering engine like FreeType or OS X, on the other hand.
Oh, I see, it's namedropping zealotry. OsX's font rendering is fuzzy, and looks bad at low to medium resolutions. The pablum platitudes about "attempting to maintain the spirit and accuracy of a font" are just that - vacuous vaguaries. Back here in the real world, the fontography community has been horrified with Apple for years, and we're all quite disgusted with OsX's font renderer (before you start pointing out counterexamples, start by checking whether they're Mac zealots, and whether they use any detailed discussions of the technology that can't be found in marketing literature.
Now, I'm certainly not saying ClearType is the best of the game; indeed, both FreeType and AGG have significantly superior subpixel antialiasing, which you can see by blowing most fonts up to a very large size and looking at their mostly horizontal curves. But, jesus, the second you threw OsX in there you lost all credibility. It doesn't even have directionally balanced hinting, for christ's sake. What is this, 1998? (No, really: Windows 98 had it.) Everyone goes "oh well Apple just doesn't want to sacrifice the fonts' accuracy for the pixel grid," or similar nonsense; what they're missing is that paying attention to the pixel grid isn't being lazy, it's being able to render more accurate detail at a specific resolution. (Indeed, that's even what the supposedly critical Apple truetype hinting patent is about.) In the meantime, the "distances" they're "being more faithful to" are fractions of a pixel that you can't see; if you really think you'd rather have a W that looks heavier on one side than on the other than have a W which is offset by a quarter of a pixel, well, just let me be sure never to take typography classes from you. There's a reason that nobody has used a Mac to make fonts since OsX, and it's not because Mac's blurry, balance-challenged mess of an antialiaser is superior.
In the meantime, Candara is a very complex font, whereas Geometrics are extremely simple. Since their weight never changes and since their arcs are so rigid, geometrics traditionally gain almost nothing from high resolution; in fact, that's why Helvetica-derived fonts like Arial were so popular on the early web, since they show up nicely at resolutions that few of us would consider today. As resolutions go up, however, their ridiculous monotony starts shining like a beacon of hate; geometric fonts look like crap as soon as you have a display resolution high enough to see them. Candara benefits from high resolutions, and geometrics from low resolutions; you've just got this ass backwards. Apple's "grid independent rendering" does nothing for fonts which are always linear multiples apart. Nothing at all. It's fonts like Candara that are
What would happen though if a thousand, or tens of thousands of unhappy customers walked into Comcast offices across the country and hammered computers and phones into pieces? Would police really arrest a dozen people a day?
If they were all illegally destroying things? Yes. And the person who organized them would be in serious hot water.
The whole goal of the 800 number, hours on hold, pass the buck, blame the customer routine is to ensure that a company never has to take responsibility for their actions.
And how would destroying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of office equipment, which would promptly be paid for by the insurance underwriter, change that?
Real live people, especially armed people, cannot be ignored
If you'll RTFA, the whole reason she showed up with a hammer is that the first time she showed up as a real live person, she was ignored. And, what do you know, nothing's really changed. Real live people with weapons in fact can be ignored, and generally will be, unless it comes to injuring office workers (which, in a flood of thousands of angry customers with weapons, isn't tremendously unlikely.) And when it comes to injuring office workers, all you're doing is telling Comcast to hire more security and pass the cost on to you.
Out of curiosity, why couldn't the college ditch comcast and purchase bandwidth via a couple T3s and buy a couple switches?
When you get a T3, you have to pay to have the cable laid out to you. Whereas that's not a problem in the city where you're likely near a major circuit, a small liberal arts college is likely to be out in the sticks. Chances are they couldn't afford the installation.
I'm halfway through the comments on the article, and you're the first person I've seen trying to stand up for Comcast. I've never been a Comcast customer, but I find that somewhat telling.
Do you genuinely think that paying them tens of millions a year is the only way to keep upper management honest?
The typical reasoning - and I know, this is a non sequitor from what you were responding to, but still - for paying upper management obscene sums of money is that it's simply cost effective. There are a handful of managers in the world who are measurably better than everyone else, and when one of those people steers your organization, your profits go up commensurately. Put one of those people at the helm of a company already making billions, and their presence will benefit the company to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The top tier of any intellectual job is always fought over by companies. When that top tier individual is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, then you have to pay them tens of millions to keep them - because if you don't, someone else will.
Now, I don't know for the CEO of Comcast, but there are many examples of such individuals having been a tremendously good business decision. There's a reason the behavior is so common in major companies. It's just good business.
Another quote: "Manassas police spokesman Sgt. Tim Neumann says there have been other police calls to that Comcast office..." I would love to know why.
Unfortunately, it's probably very pedestrian stuff. For example, it's common for large companies to call the cops every time they fire an executive or a security officer. Comcast's offices are likely to be large, meaning they're a likely target for minor burglaries or vandalism. If there's any sexual harassment, if someone has a nervous breakdown, if there's a wild or asocial animal in an area without animal control, if someone's buried under a pile of doughnuts, there are actually tons of reasons to involve the police.
If they made good stories, the sergeant would know what they were about. (Maybe he wouldn't tell us, but he'd know.) Therefore, it's likely that they're mostly boring.
System vendor software is always bad, because it's the defacto. Get something from an independant vendor - some place like TiVo or ReplayTV - and it's going to be a whole different story. Note how people hated the Replay 2000 series? (I had one; it was awful.) But, once they were no longer the bundled component, suddenly they were very, very worried about whether people liked the interface - because otherwise, nobody would buy one. The Replay 3000 was a huge improvement. I haven't seen the 4000 or 5000, but I bet they're better still.
I have a TiVo these days, and I adore it. It does almost everything right. In the entire time I've owned it, it's only crashed once (it's disappointing that appliances crash at all, but, well, compare that to my Replay 2000 and suddenly that's a superior record.) TiVo customer service is similarly awesome. During the entire time I owned my Replay - about eighteen months before the hard drive went bad - I was never able to get Replay to update certain wrong channel information with their channel data provider, Tribune (once called Trumpet Media.) When I got my TiVo, I called in once, and they said "it'll take about a week." It was done in two days. (Again, when I had a replay, it was a platform device; since they're now sold stand alone, I suspect their problems are gone.)
You get what you pay for. You've already had two free DVRs that you hated. The free DVR from another company won't be any better. Bite the bullet and get a box from the companies that only sell boxes, because whether or not you like those devices is important to the company.
Slashdot Mirror
It's times like this I wish I could calc sarchasm on SlashDot. (No, it's not a misspelling, it's an inside joke. Yes, I know, if it meant what you thought it meant, there wouldn't be an 'H' there. Don't get distracted.)
Long and short of it: if you can't argue it without Google, you also can't argue it with Google - whether you know that or not seems to be entirely a different matter.Would that there were such a people, that you might be tossed in the hoosegow for a few weeks for hyperbole without comprehension. This world would be a lot better if, next to the drunk tank, there was a self important buffoon who doesn't know when to quit making an ass out of himself tank.
That's funny - people in academia disagree. You'll excuse me if I don't take the word of a random slashdotter over a college education, I trust.
Dictionaries sell according to word count. Therefore, to accept new definitions is an advertising tactic. The Oxford English Dictionary hasn't had standards for forty years; that's why they've accepted the misspelled company name of a company that has existed for less than ten years as a non-slang word. That is contrary to the rules Oxford themselves laid out less than fifty years ago, wherein a term in circulation for less than a hundred years could not be considered anything but slang, and could have no normative meaning.
Linguistics isn't an armchair game. If you've never taken classes or read textbooks (and it's pretty clear that you haven't if you think the OED is a lexicon with discretionary quality worth using as a reference) then you should stop pretending to know what you're talking about.
Chances are pretty good that you've never met anyone from the era that everyone's trying so hard to pretend they were a part of. Programmers back then numbered in the tens of thousands, worldwide.
That bit about "when hypocrites attack?" I'm having a hard time figuring out whether you mean the MPAA, TorrentSpy, or yourself. I'd ask you to clarify, except that I don't actually want for you to do so.
Just because you want to pretend stealing movies is okay, even if you have a flimsy justification, doesn't mean that it actually is. A better man would be ashamed to have said what you just said in public.
Yeah, because anyone who spends $15,000 to stop a haemmorrhaging of millions of dollars a month is totally braindead, and if the problem can't be stopped, there's no sense in trying to make it less bad.
It's a shame there isn't a metamoderation for "blind zealot." Whoever modded you up wasn't thinking.
The Jargon File isn't a social handbook. Let it go.
By the way, TrueType was never superior to PS Type 1. Whatever you were reading may explain your current conceptual model of algorithmic font layout concerns, which are called "fontography," rather than all type layout concerns, which are called "typography." It's a bit like suggesting that algebra doesn't exist because your software package says it's for math: a mistake that only a rank amateur would make. Just because your day job is drawing stuff in GoLive doesn't mean you're a designer. When you've taken classes and are familiar with typographic history, or at least display some remote comprehension of what you're talking about, let someone know.
But not me. I'm not interested.
Maybe you should try looking. As I clearly said previously, they can be freely downloaded and used, just like the T and V series.
You're nuts. Myriad is a simple low-serif geometric grotesk, and isn't honestly that nice anyway. You might as well be bragging about Obelysk or Slab Serif. There's a reason geometric fonts have dropped out of use, except on the web: they look awful, no matter what you do. Candara is a weighted, hinted derist font with line cueing, directional caps, kerned weighting, distance kerning, clustering and grouping. They're in a completely different ballpark. If you want an Adobe font of similar caliber, they exist; Jensen, for example, is of that quality plateau. No swiss derived font has anything even approaching this level of detail.
Oh, I see, it's namedropping zealotry. OsX's font rendering is fuzzy, and looks bad at low to medium resolutions. The pablum platitudes about "attempting to maintain the spirit and accuracy of a font" are just that - vacuous vaguaries. Back here in the real world, the fontography community has been horrified with Apple for years, and we're all quite disgusted with OsX's font renderer (before you start pointing out counterexamples, start by checking whether they're Mac zealots, and whether they use any detailed discussions of the technology that can't be found in marketing literature.
Now, I'm certainly not saying ClearType is the best of the game; indeed, both FreeType and AGG have significantly superior subpixel antialiasing, which you can see by blowing most fonts up to a very large size and looking at their mostly horizontal curves. But, jesus, the second you threw OsX in there you lost all credibility. It doesn't even have directionally balanced hinting, for christ's sake. What is this, 1998? (No, really: Windows 98 had it.) Everyone goes "oh well Apple just doesn't want to sacrifice the fonts' accuracy for the pixel grid," or similar nonsense; what they're missing is that paying attention to the pixel grid isn't being lazy, it's being able to render more accurate detail at a specific resolution. (Indeed, that's even what the supposedly critical Apple truetype hinting patent is about.) In the meantime, the "distances" they're "being more faithful to" are fractions of a pixel that you can't see; if you really think you'd rather have a W that looks heavier on one side than on the other than have a W which is offset by a quarter of a pixel, well, just let me be sure never to take typography classes from you. There's a reason that nobody has used a Mac to make fonts since OsX, and it's not because Mac's blurry, balance-challenged mess of an antialiaser is superior.
In the meantime, Candara is a very complex font, whereas Geometrics are extremely simple. Since their weight never changes and since their arcs are so rigid, geometrics traditionally gain almost nothing from high resolution; in fact, that's why Helvetica-derived fonts like Arial were so popular on the early web, since they show up nicely at resolutions that few of us would consider today. As resolutions go up, however, their ridiculous monotony starts shining like a beacon of hate; geometric fonts look like crap as soon as you have a display resolution high enough to see them. Candara benefits from high resolutions, and geometrics from low resolutions; you've just got this ass backwards. Apple's "grid independent rendering" does nothing for fonts which are always linear multiples apart. Nothing at all. It's fonts like Candara that are
Violence doesn't solve anything.
I'm halfway through the comments on the article, and you're the first person I've seen trying to stand up for Comcast. I've never been a Comcast customer, but I find that somewhat telling.
Now, I don't know for the CEO of Comcast, but there are many examples of such individuals having been a tremendously good business decision. There's a reason the behavior is so common in major companies. It's just good business.
If they made good stories, the sergeant would know what they were about. (Maybe he wouldn't tell us, but he'd know.) Therefore, it's likely that they're mostly boring.
System vendor software is always bad, because it's the defacto. Get something from an independant vendor - some place like TiVo or ReplayTV - and it's going to be a whole different story. Note how people hated the Replay 2000 series? (I had one; it was awful.) But, once they were no longer the bundled component, suddenly they were very, very worried about whether people liked the interface - because otherwise, nobody would buy one. The Replay 3000 was a huge improvement. I haven't seen the 4000 or 5000, but I bet they're better still.
I have a TiVo these days, and I adore it. It does almost everything right. In the entire time I've owned it, it's only crashed once (it's disappointing that appliances crash at all, but, well, compare that to my Replay 2000 and suddenly that's a superior record.) TiVo customer service is similarly awesome. During the entire time I owned my Replay - about eighteen months before the hard drive went bad - I was never able to get Replay to update certain wrong channel information with their channel data provider, Tribune (once called Trumpet Media.) When I got my TiVo, I called in once, and they said "it'll take about a week." It was done in two days. (Again, when I had a replay, it was a platform device; since they're now sold stand alone, I suspect their problems are gone.)
You get what you pay for. You've already had two free DVRs that you hated. The free DVR from another company won't be any better. Bite the bullet and get a box from the companies that only sell boxes, because whether or not you like those devices is important to the company.